Examination of Witnesses (Questions 560
- 579)
TUESDAY 28 MARCH 2006
MS CHRISTINE
LEE, MR
ROBERT LEE
AND MS
XIAO HONG
Q560 Chairman: Thank you for joining
us this morning. You sat in on the earlier session so you have
an idea of how things work. Can I ask you each of you to introduce
yourselves briefly, for the record? Christine Lee?
Ms Lee: My name is Christine Lee.
I am the Chairman of the North London Chinese Association covering
Brent, Barnet and Harrow, and also the coordinator for the Immigration
and Nationality Bill 2005 campaign, an also the representative
of the Chinese community, the whole Chinese community in the UK.
I have set out a brief account already. On my right is the employer.
Q561 Chairman: Mr Lee. You are an
employer?
Mr Lee: Yes. I run restaurants
and I am here to give an account of my experience that I have
been faced with.
Q562 Chairman: Ms Hong.
Ms Lee: This is Xiao Hong, who
is the employee who has difficulty in getting entry clearance
to come over, but she managed to get here now. But her English
is not very good.
Q563 Chairman: So you will be translating
for us. Thank you very much indeed. Can I start by asking some
general questions? Inevitably at the top of everyone's mind over
the last few days has been the Morecambe Bay tragedy and the sentencing
of at least some of those who were involved in that trafficking.
We would like to think, I am sure, that that is not a typical
experience of that level of exploitation and abuse that those
people suffered, before they died as well as their tragic deaths.
But could you give us some idea? Of the about 400,000 Chinese
that you believe are living and working in the UK how many of
those suffer the sort of extreme exploitation that we all got
a glimpse of in the Morecambe Bay tragedy?
Ms Lee: I have been working on
this Bill and lobbying the government for the last four months.
I have been travelling up and down the country for four months
as well and I have been through the whole country talking to all
the Chinese community and Morecambe Bay is very exceptional—I
have never heard anything like this before. So I can assure you
during my four months of talking to the Chinese employers that
they all suffer what I have set out below; but the Morecambe Bay
case is a very exceptional case.
Q564 Chairman: Obviously the deaths
are tragically exceptional but your own view is that there are
not large numbers of Chinese in this country employed in such
an abusive or exploitative way for such low wages?
Ms Lee: Not the ones that I have
been talking too, obviously; if they have they will not be talking
to me about it. So all I can tell you is that during the last
few months all the employers I talked to have the same problems
as Mr Lee and not of the Morecambe Bay's problems.
Q565 Chairman: Do you have any sense
of how many people are working in those circumstances at all?
You say it is exceptional, but it has painted a picture for most
of the public that perhaps that this is a fairly typical experience
of people trafficking and exploitation in this country.
Ms Lee: Yes. A lot of the problems
that you see are on the media. The perception is that there is
a lot of exploitation from the employer but this is not true.
The true fact is that because there is a chef shortage in this
country if the employers want to maintain their business they
have to employ chefs and the government should help the employers
to get these chefs.
Q566 Chairman: We will come directly
to the issue about chefs and the legal migration you are looking
for in a moment, but I think we all know that there is some straightforward
illegal trafficking of Chinese people and by no means all of those
people go into the restaurant trades or what one might call legitimate
businesses. It may be, as you say, that you are not the person
who has a sense of how big that issue is, but it is quite important
for us because our report may need to give some idea about the
priority that ought to be given to tackling that problem as opposed
to other issues. So leaving aside the restaurant trade for a moment,
do you have a sense of how big the business is of people working
here illegally in agriculture, construction or other sectors?
Ms Lee: No.
Q567 Chairman: Let us turn now to
the issue of employers' liability, which is a particular issue
you have raised with us. You are concerned, I know, that the government
is now enforcing the existing legislation to prevent illegal labour
in restaurants—you say there has been a big impact. Has
there, to your knowledge, been a big increase in the prosecution
of employers and illegal labour?
Ms Lee: In the last two months
there has been an increase but before that only about 21 cases
have been prosecuted.
Q568 Chairman: So when you say that
there is big impact has that mainly been, if you like, fear amongst
employers that they are likely to be prosecuted rather than actual
prosecutions?
Ms Lee: Yes, the fear of being
prosecuted is very, very important. Section 8, the maximum that
they can go to jail for is 14 years, so obviously they are very
worried.
Q569 Chairman: You raise the difficulties
that an employer has of keeping track of their employee's immigration
status. What ways around that might there be so that employers
are aware of whether their employees remain legal migrants? Should
the Home Office, for example, have the responsibility for telling
employers if there is, for example, a refusal to extend the permission
to remain, or something of that sort? What is the best way around
that problem?
Ms Lee: When the civil penalties
come into force there is a Code of Practice. I have seen the Code
of Practice and it is very slim, there is nothing in it to tell
the employer what he exactly needs to do. So I think that if you
can bring in a law such as this that affects the employers then
they should have the regional bases where the employer can actually
phone up and ask them what they are supposed to do with the employees,
because a lot of the employees will come up with the piece of
paper to say that they are allowed to work. For example, asylum
seekers can come up with the IS91 and say that they are allowed
to work and this piece of paper could be false, but as far as
the employers are concerned they would not know the difference
between genuine documents or not. So if you set up a regional
office then the employers would be able to ask for particular
information so that they would get the response and would not
get prosecuted just because they cannot read whether they are
false documents or not.
Chairman: Thank you. Steve McCabe.
Q570 Steve McCabe: Ms Lee, the other
thing you said in your report was that the government has not
responded very favourably to representations made by the Chinese
business community. I have two questions. Firstly, what is the
mechanism for communicating with the government? Is it only the
All Party Chinese in Britain Forum or are there other methods
as well?
Ms Lee: We have 680 organisations
that have joined us already, so when you actually start your White
Paper or Green Paper all you need to do is to let us give you
the list of people that you can contact, because after four months
of lobbying I have this list now. So if you can give us some way
in which we can call upon the whole of the country then we will
be able to give you the specific list that you need, to give it
to the Chinese community as such. At the moment all we are relying
on is the All Party Group and Andrew Dismore as the Chairperson,
and through that we learned a little bit about the law making
process; but before that we did not have a clue and because of
the language barriers it is very, very difficult for us to get
anywhere near the government, never mind being told what is going
on. In cases like that the 2005 Bill affects not just the employer
but it affects a lot of different society as well, so we ought
to be told really before you start making the law.
Q571 Steve McCabe: So the main mechanism
at the moment is the All Party Group but there is a much wider
list that could be made available. Thank you. In terms of the
representations you have made, however they have been made at
the moment, have you received any response from the government,
formal or informal, and what was that response?
Ms Lee: Not really. I have been
lobbying the House of Lords quite heavily for the last three months
and the House of Lords have been absolutely wonderful. A lot of
Lords and Baronesses have been helping us with the Bill, especially
Lady Ashton, Lord Dholakia and Lady Anelay, and these are people
have really pushed the Bill out for us and getting what we demanded.
We enclose a letter from Lady Ashton as well to say that they
agree with our points and that they would talk to the government
about it. I did manage to talk to Tony McNulty as well and he
has agreed some of our demands—some he does not but some
he does. Apart from that I think they are trying to make us aware
of what is happening now much more than before the lobbying, so
hopefully we will manage to talk to Tony McNulty's staff because
he says that we can talk to the staff about the skill shortage
on the chef front.
Q572 Mrs Cryer: I just want to ask
Mr Lee about the shortage of qualified chefs in this country.
Robert, I understand that you had a catering business, a restaurant
and you had to close because you could not get qualified chefs
at all; is that the case?
Mr Lee: Yes, that is the reality
I have been facing. I am for a controlled environment in terms
of issuing work permits to anybody, regardless of their origins
and where they are from, because it is just commonsense, is it
not? I can give you my personal experience.
Q573 Mrs Cryer: Yes, indeed, but
particularly with regard to immigration control.
Mrt Lee: I had to close one of
my restaurants—it is a small, countryside hotel with a restaurant
inside—because of staff shortage. I had to shuttle between
different places all the time, racing against time. I have not
been trained by profession as a chef but because of all these
successive crises in terms of staffing I was forced into it by
default and now I am a chef. It is a diabolical situation. I have
been thinking about quitting the business altogether because it
is not workable at all. But can I elaborate? I was really thrilled
when I learned that I could employ the Polish or people from the
Eastern European blocs because now they are EU Member States.
But going back to the gentleman's point, of course we can employ
a lot of EU staff here but the real factor is the language barrier
and I cannot cope on a daily basis. I can give you some examples.
When customers order something they always get something wrong.
For example, I divided the whole evening into time slots. If for
the first half an hour or an hour we were failing then that would
have a knock-on effect on subsequent custom. If we were failing
in terms of serving we are failing and it is not on. I have to
give specific instructions to staff, like having a brief staff
meeting before we kick-start. It is like a football team, everybody
has to play their own role and if one link is failing it is not
working. I had to explain at great length to no avail about certain
instructions. Even customers face the same thing. I had one customer,
who is a local businessman, saying that they are—but I cannot
say the word, it is not politically correct. Now I am employing
staff from Poland and he wants to get his wife to work in my place
as well and I said, "That is fine," but when she came
to see him I was trying to talk to her, "Do you want to see
Cooper?" and she could not understand that, and that is very
difficult. It is not just about ability, I think language varies
and that is the first step to tackle, apart from hands-on experience,
whether you are familiar with certain types of tasks. I think
chef-ing is a very specialised skill. I can say something about
Chinese chef-ing that because of the way that we cook food it
takes a while to train. I was trying to train up some Polish guys
to learn how to wok, how to chef, and after a few weeks they just
gave up. At the moment I am employing university students as part-time
staff but because of the constraints laid down by the Student
Union I cannot really affect their studies. So I have to spread
out the shifts in order to facilitate their hours and sometimes
that is not working either because in this trade there is a high
turnover of staff.
Chairman: I think we have the picture
quite well.
Q574 Mrs Cryer: So you have a problem
with the Poles not speaking English and Chinese people who you
just cannot acquire with their skills, as far as Chinese food
is concerned. Apparently there is a problem also in Bangladeshi,
Indian and Pakistani catering establishments, so they have a shortage
of skilled chefs. Do you think that it might be a good idea to
introduce new courses at colleges in the UK for food preparation?
I am thinking particularly of Food Hygiene Regulations but also
specific ways of cooking for Chinese and Indian food. I do not
think there are any, but you tell me: are there courses?
Mr Lee: Yes, definitely. Eventually
that may be the natural outcome of the whole thing. I have been
thinking about this as well, to start a sort of miniature chef
school locally.
Q575 Mrs Cryer: Have you put this
idea to the Government, through Christine?
Ms Lee: Yes, we told the Government
that there is absolutely no catering school to train their chefs
and that they are all hands-on. They have to be in the kitchen
to be able to train. Chinese and Indian food is very different.
You cannot really learn just from the catering college. You can
learn the basics, but you still have to be hands-on and to work
inside the kitchen before you know what is what. It takes five
years upwards to learn the skill of a head chef.
Q576 Mrs Cryer: But it would be helpful
to have this basic training in colleges, for food hygiene for
instance?
Mr Lee: I think that food hygiene
is a necessity; it is the compulsory thing that we need to do
anyway. Regardless of what kind of cuisine you do, if you are
a food handler then you have to go through the basic food hygiene
course in order to handle food. In terms of different cuisines,
I think that eventually we have to think about that, yes.
Q577 Mrs Cryer: So the need for these
courses has already been put to the Government?
Ms Lee: No, it is more that the
Government have put it towards us. The Government have mentioned
it but, as I said before, it is very difficult even to get English
people interested in coming into a Chinese kitchen, never mind
cooking. They are not that bothered and they are not that interested.
Yes, we can help to set up or whatever, and even lots of restaurants
are prepared to invite people to come into their kitchen and work.
A lot of employees I spoke to said, "Yes, we would be very
happy to come". They do say that they will come and say,
"Yes, I will be coming to train". Then, after a few
phone calls, they just give up. The thought of going to a Chinese
restaurant, seeing loads of Chinese people working in the kitchen,
is just not what they wanted. It is long hours; it is very hard
work; and loads of Chinese people yapping in Chinese—not
many people would want that! They try it; they try it for a few
hours and, after that, you never see sight of them again. It is
very difficult.
Q578 Chairman: The implication of
what you are saying about the changes in the new Immigration and
Nationality Bill is actually that the restaurant trade has existed
for years on the basis of illegal migration that everyone has
turned a blind eye to. Is that fair?
Ms Lee: Yes, I think your Morecambe
Bay business may come into that, because a lot of employers do
not know what the papers are all about. If the employee who is
an illegal immigrant comes in with a piece of paper to say that
they are allowed to work, with that piece of paper the employer
can actually employ them and put them through to the NI and the
PAYE. As far as the employer is concerned, they are doing a good
job; they are employing genuine people. But from your side they
are illegal people. A lot of these people are earning a lot of
money; then they bring it back to China and start building houses.
When the Chinese people see all the houses being built, they say,
"Wow! This is a place we should be going"; therefore
people are coming to the UK, because they are making a lot of
money. Therefore, the civil penalties are very important. You
have to have the core practice whereby all the employers know
exactly what they are employing.
Mr Lee: I really want to have
a day when we can normalise or regulate the catering business.
At the moment, because of the severe shortage of chefs, in my
experience, it is not very good. Because of the market force,
they manage to demand a high salary. It is a very heavy burden
on running costs. If we had more new chefs, then we would not
have to face these threats all the time.
Q579 Mr Winnick: Arising from the
last questions, it is rather ironic, is it not, that a lot of
people in this country who complain about asylum seekers, illegal
workers and the rest, are quite happy to go and have a Chinese
takeaway, where in fact the people involved are in that category?
That has occurred to you, has it?
Mr Lee: Does it imply that we
are all engaged in this facilitating—
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